During that concert and the massive publicity surrounding it, Nelson Mandela was presented to millions of young people around the world as a wrongly imprisoned, peace-loving freedom fighter, detained for decades by the evil, crazy, stupid white South Africans, who kept the rest of the country's majority black population enslaved to various degrees, too.

During the 1950s Mandela was banned, arrested and imprisonedfor challenging apartheid. He was one of the accused in the massive Treason Trial at the end of the decade and, following the 1960 banning of the ANC, he went underground, adopting a number of disguises--sometimes a laborer, other times a chauffeur. The press dubbed him "the Black Pimpernel" because of his ability to evade police.

And when Mandela was arrested, the authorities claimed to have uncovered "210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminium powder and 1 ton of black powder."

Governments around the world, such as the ones in the U.S. and Great Britain, placed the ANC on their terror lists, along with the PLO, the IRA and the FLQ.

So when the Left adopted the destruction of apartheid as its new fashionable cause in the late 1980s, the organizer of that "Free Nelson Mandela" concert, Tony Hollingsworth, knew he needed to "personalize" the cause, and give that particular person a big makeover, pronto.